Search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) are both great online marketing technique to increase traffic to your website. But both are completely different in implementation. Search engine marketing is the sponsored results where you can see in many search engines. The owner of those sponsored ads will buy (yep, it costs money) certain keywords for cost per click (CPC) that’ll ensure their website always rank on the first page of the search results. SEM can be handy when it comes to keywords that are impossible to beat. If you want an instant result, SEM is the best choice.
SEO on the other hand, is a combination of a couple of techniques that makes your website rank higher on the search engines result position. It involves optimizing the layout, title and footer, link building, and content. The best thing about SEO is it doesn’t involve money, i.e it’s FREE.
Which one to choose, SEM or SEO
Many webmasters concluded that if you choose SEO, you should stick with it, concentrate and focus, don’t ever get involve with SEM and vice versa. I agree with that but sometimes, both SEM and SEO must be parallel and in hand. Depending on your budget and your target.
Once you did the research on the keyword, it’s time for you to set the target. If the keyword is hard to compete, SEM is the definite choice if you wants an instant result. During the campaign, continue to strengthen your website by doing the SEO. You will get your desired traffic and at the same time crawling your website to the top of search engine result position.
For a keyword that is not competitive (in my scale, 1000000 results and below), doing just SEO is enough to market your website and get the organic traffic.
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